


when i'm down on my knees, you're how i pray

by whitenoisce



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Canon Compliant, Day 7: Free Day, Edgeplay, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Fingerfucking, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:41:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28480083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitenoisce/pseuds/whitenoisce
Summary: And here lies Lee Donghyuck; a melody that shakes and trembles like a man who witnessed murder by his own hands.Because isn’t that what it is, in the end? Donghyuck dies in Mark’s arms every night, and no matter how many times the morning digs him back up, the brand of Mark’s touch never fades. It only extends an invitation for another death, and Donghyuck—addicted and so in love, RSVPs again and again.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 73
Kudos: 469
Collections: Markhyuck Week 2021





	when i'm down on my knees, you're how i pray

**there will come soft rains**

The first time it happens, Donghyuck is slumped on the floor of a humid practice room, stringy-haired and warm, only vaguely aware that the world has somehow begun to end. 

You can argue that he’s gotten used to it. It’s just soup of the day, regular fare. Tuesday practice sessions are always some sort of apocalyptic anyway if you ask him—boy sweat and award show anthems and twenty three pairs of feet stomping strong enough to expedite the second coming—but this, oh this is something else entirely. 

Have you ever seen a stampede? No? Well good, cause you’re about to. Donghyuck can see them fixing window formations as he catches his breath, and once they figure it all out, he’ll have to slip back in between Ten and Jaemin while Mark leads their proverbial pack, screaming at their grimy reflections on the mirror to resonate (resonate). 

Someone to his left hands him a bottle of water and Donghyuck takes it, thinking to himself that he doesn’t actually know what the word means. It’s not one of those single syllable nothings that Johnny teaches him at night whenever they lurk on stan twitter—which means the word can’t be _that_ important in the grand scheme of things, but of course, Mark somehow has the ability to make it sound like it is. 

Re-so-nate. That’s three syllables: a curling of the tongue, a staved hiss, and a graze on the palette right before a tap on the teeth. Resonate. 

Donghyuck repeats after himself, shadowing the shape of Mark’s lips in the mirror when he rolls his shoulders back and raises a brow in attempts to figure out the best way to get the general public to kneel before twenty three men. 

It doesn’t take much, Donghyuck thinks, when their eyes meet for a brief second in the reflection. Not much at all.

His thirst drains the bottle within a span of a distant _5, 6, 7, 8!_ and afterwards, he smacks his lips—neatly folding his legs underneath himself—and waits for the storm to pass so at the end of the world, he can at least keep dancing. 

**the beginning is seven years away**

Right before Donghyuck falls asleep that night, his phone buzzes next to his face with a violence that shakes him awake. 

The clock reads sometime around 2 AM and Donghyuck knows anything Mark sends him past midnight’s gotta be scourged from the depths of fandom hell, but he opens it up anyway. 

> **Mark**  
>  lmao remember this

Donghyuck expects it to be one of those racy postype fanarts Mark loves so much when they’re away— _thank you for my pornography!_ —but what loads is anything but. 

Attached on the screen instead is a grainy pre-debut photo of them with Jeno and Jaemin, goofing around in a McDonald’s after training. There’s a blown up watermark across their matching snapbacks, and Donghyuck notes the smear of soft serve vanilla at the corner of his mouth matching the aborted sundae on Mark’s tray. 

Years after this, Mark would learn to smear something entirely different across Donghyuck’s lips. It would not be as sweet, but Donghyuck wouldn’t waste a single drop. 

**Donghyuck**  
ew  
what about it

Donghyuck knows he should sleep if only because he has a schedule tomorrow, but Mark’s always been the worst thing that’s happened to his self-control. 

> **Mark**  
>  nothing  
>  you were cute

**Donghyuck**  
excuse me? were????

> **Mark**  
>  details details  
>  anyw i’m saying this bc i realized i sort of owe you?  
>  if that makes sense idk haha  
>  i would have never been able to tell you that then

And so the world crackles, the aircon hums, and Johnny turns a full 180 in his sleep. Something heavy gets stuck in his throat and Donghyuck realizes right then and there that the end of the world didn’t actually begin in that hot and humid training room, no. 

It starts earlier, much earlier. A couple floors down, roughly seven years ago against the tacky backdrop of a bright blue sky. It was at a time before Haechan existed and he was just Lee Donghyuck—the hush hush fresh blood from the Saturday Open that everybody had been too scared to approach.

But like today, the end of the world met his eyes in the mirror, all gift-wrapped in a pair of DC shoes and a snapback too big for his then-small head. He had a b-boy twang about him and a pair of eyebrows that shot through the heavens, but that was no matter.

Because the shy smile he sent Donghyuck’s way was a cataclysmic collision of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, and unbeknownst to everyone else in that room, what results afterward is the beginning of Donghyuck’s end.

> **Mark**  
>  did you fall asleep lol

**Donghyuck**  
you alone?

> **Mark**  
>  ???  
>  yeah

**Donghyuck**  
god i’m coming up  
*good

And it will continue to end. 

**when i’m down on my knees, you’re how i pray**

On the last day of Kick It and the first day of Punch, Mark tells the videocam posing as Donghyuck that he worries for his neck and back _, or was it his knee?_ Donghyuck couldn’t contain his laughter when he watched the playback for the first time, because for the most part Mark was right. It _was_ his neck and back. 

It’s the knees that came from something else entirely, which is to say—Mark is a good boy in many ways. He calls his mom often, washes cups when he can, and has subconsciously taken note of Donghyuck’s sporadic complaints about the floor being too hard whenever he went to town on Mark’s dick. 

Case in point: The floor is still being difficult, but Donghyuck can’t feel it over the softness of the pillow Mark had dropped a perfect second before he landed on his knees. 

It was impressive, considering how Donghyuck hadn’t planned on any of this happening. 

He had snuck out of the fifth floor dorms only for the innocuous reason that he wanted to feel Mark close by after an unprompted epiphany. One does not simply sleep alone after the ground has been pulled out from under them, so Donghyuck took to rolling out of the covers to seek shelter in Mark’s warm embrace five floors up instead. 

The universe, it seems, had other plans. 

When Donghyuck barged into his room, Mark was hunched over his laptop, watching another one of those fan made compilations on YouTube.

It’s nothing new, Mark does this all the time. Except in place of his usual aegyo, what Mark’s got pulled up on his screen instead is a compilation of Donghyuck’s best stages—the ones where he purposely looks for familiar fansite cameras, holds a heated gaze, and hopes the video would keep someone up at night. 

At the hit of a spacebar, Donghyuck threw the mental image of cuddling out the window to pray instead, on the altar between Mark’s hips. 

He moans gratuitously around Mark, hot and slow, preening at Mark’s obvious desperation not to come too quickly. Donghyuck himself is straining in his shorts, but Mark’s been bubbling around the edges since before Donghyuck walked in, and there was _still_ seven minutes left on that video.

“How’d you like me, hyung?” Donghyuck asks him, eyes all pretty and wide when he suckles the sensitive head of Mark’s weeping cock. “In blond? Blazers? _Boom_?”

Above him, Mark tenses and Donghyuck smiles, pumping him harder on the upstroke like some sort of a reward. 

Cut from the same cloth, two peas in a pod. Those first few months navigating his dreams without a compass were the hardest, but someone had once said that the flower that blooms in adversity is the most beautiful of all, and Donghyuck knows that deep down, Mark thought so too. 

Donghyuck wraps his lips back around Mark’s cock and sucks, revelling at the sight of abs tensing and untensing in front of him. He only falters when Mark speaks up again, something unexpected and wholly sacred tumbling out of his lips. 

“You,” came Mark’s answer, swinging like a hinge through gritted teeth and labored breathing. “I like you like you.”

Donghyuck allows the weight of those words to paralyze him for only a moment before he’s bouncing back tighter, hotter, and impossibly hungrier as he shoves all of Mark that he can fit down his throat. 

There is a proper cadence to these holy things, he knows, but none of it matters when Mark’s got his hair fisted up in his hand, bringing tears to his eyes when he pushes Donghyuck _down, down, down_. 

And when Donghyuck looks back on this memory, he will realize that this moment is where he learns about resonance. Mark nearly shouts when he falls apart by Donghyuck’s mouth, but it’s the delicate whisper with which his hallowed words have been said that would reverberate loud in Donghyuck’s ears in the days to come. 

**ooh, baby do you know what that’s worth?**

The next day, Donghyuck stumbles into the recording booth twenty minutes late, dressed in a day-old hoodie made for someone with wider shoulders, longer arms, and a heart far bigger than he can carry. The heady scent of last night’s vices cling like ivy around his throat, and his voice fractures and breaks in places where they shouldn’t when it tries to show him nineties love. 

“Haechan-ssi, do you need a break?” 

It’s been about an hour since they started, and Donghyuck looks up from his bloodied score sheets to see the look of concern that passes over the producer’s face. 

Donghyuck found his voice at the tail end of 2017, and since then he’s been known around these circles to spend less and less time in recording booths at each and every comeback. The poor guy mixing the music probably thinks he’s caught a nasty quarantine bug, but Donghyuck doesn’t know how to tell him that the rasp was a natural consequence of a throat used to sheath a sword. 

“No need.” He pokes a tongue through the tough wall of his cheeks, and if he closes his eyes, the pressure from the outside starts to feel like yesternight’s penance. The ringing begins here. “Let’s start from the top.” 

**into a bright bound, sea surrounded fury**

The clock strikes Thursday, and there’s something about the way the tomatoes skin themselves on the stove that makes Donghyuck want to flay himself alive. 

He doesn’t mean a 21st century version of a burlesque peep show, sloughing off his layers one by one and winking through the sting. What he wants is a full undressing, something that will rid himself of this corporeal cage so that he could fling himself into a riptide of oil and see if he would sizzle the same. 

Three tablespoons of ketchup. Two teaspoons of sugar. Donghyuck pokes and prods at the pan with his chopsticks and waits for all of them to make friends with each other. It happens fast. A blink and a half has him staring at this big mass of murder, and Donghyuck’s chest blooms with fascination at the way sad, decimated pieces of fruit and condiments can come together into something that Mark would crave in the middle of the night. 

He wonders, cracking three eggs into a bowl and sprinkling them with salt, if Mark would want him like this—stripped out of his pretty boy clothes, seasoned with tears, convulsing at the palm of his hand. Would he rather him whole, or would he not mind him chopped into pieces, sautéed in exhaustion and praise until all his juices came gushing out? 

_“I like you like you,”_ Mark had said, some time ago on the night Donghyuck had learned a new word. Had he meant Donghyuck—the sum greater than all of his parts, or D-o-n-g-h-y-u-c-k—the little odds and ends thrown together to make up a whole? 

Donghyuck watches the tomatoes slide out of the pan, pouring in the eggs in their place and stilling himself to hear them hiss. Someone’s bound to come out of their room complaining of the noise past midnight, but he can hear footsteps outside the door shuffling in haste, and Donghyuck decides he couldn’t care less. 

“That smells amazing, seriously,” Mark exclaims when he comes in, zooming past the living room and into the starkly illuminated kitchen. 

He smells like sleep, and Donghyuck worries that if Mark nuzzles the side of his neck long enough, he’ll know that Donghyuck, too, had been dead to the world before he rang and said he wanted to eat.

“I’m almost done,” Donghyuck murmurs, shaking the pan violently over the fire to facilitate the soireé. “Get a spoon, yeah?” 

Mark’s assent vibrates all across his shoulders and back, and Donghyuck gulps down the shiver that passes through him to reach at one of the tiny containers sitting on the overhead cupboards. 

One generous pinch of pixie dust—for nothing else but to keep Mark coming back for more. 

They sit side by side along the counter, Donghyuck watching Mark bow his head in prayer over the steaming pan of tomatoes and eggs. He wonders if Mark would thank the Lord, too, for his blessings before devouring Donghyuck the next time he offers himself up to him. All of him, even the parts not marinated in magic. 

“Aren’t you eating?” Mark asks, when Donghyuck lays his chopsticks flat on the counter

Donghyuck looks at his eyes, big and wide and wondering if he has to eat this feast all by himself, and dares to blurt out, “No, I already ate,” even if his gums are aching to bite.

“Yo, _what_?” Mark’s voice pitches, and then he levels him with a look that cuts Donghyuck in half, and then again, and again, until he’s left feeling all sorts of small. “No—c’mon, split this with me. There’s plenty.” 

And so he watches Mark dig a spoon into the pan, lightly blowing on the reds and yellows that make up his heart before bringing it up to Donghyuck’s lips for a taste. 

This dish wasn’t made for self-consumption, but Mark hates eating alone almost as much as Donghyuck wants to eat him alive. That’s why Donghyuck wipes the spoon clean, feeling the savory palpitations on his tongue when Mark says, “There we go,” shooting him a satisfied smile.

Halfway through the meal, Mark would misplace an elbow and send the forlorn pair of chopsticks crashing in a metallic clang down the floor. _Oh they’re in for it now_ , Donghyuck’s conscience would say. But in reality, Donghyuck would scarcely notice the doors opening in exasperation because somehow, the ringing in his ears has only gotten louder. 

**everything is a sign, if you can read it**

When Donghyuck was young and he couldn’t sleep, his mom used to tell him stories about the day he was born. 

It always started like this: “On the sixth day of June, in the middle of the last year of the second millennium, all the gods came down to a stuffy hospital in Jongno-gu to see what all the fuss was about.”

According to her, something had shifted in the cosmos that year—roads closed down, signs were hung up, and every heavenly body was moved two inconvenient centimeters to the right. The Y2K sent the whole planet into shambles and everyone thought it was the end of the world as they knew it.

“Turns out it was only you!” she would exclaim, and then a tiny baby Donghyuck would laugh and kick his feet under the blankets in delight before eventually falling asleep.

It’s been a while since he’s last seen his mom. It’s been even longer since his last restful sleep. 

Over the years, Donghyuck had forgotten what it felt like to wield a power so great that deities would come down to earth just to see him weep. He figured that maybe being a million seller several times over just this year was as close as he was going to get. And it’s not a bad deal all things considered, but some days he’d like to be reminded what it feels like to have the real thing. 

“What … are you _wearing_?”

The cameras around the practice room are why Mark keeps his voice low, but even then the words sound like they were strangled out of his throat before finding their way out, stumbling and then barely finding their footing in a way that makes Donghyuck smile behind his mask. 

“Oh these?” Donghyuck fiddles with the holes of his jeans, and pretends not to hear Mark’s breath hitch when he slips a finger into the tight space between fabric and skin. “What about ‘em?” 

They’re the pretty ones from late last year that got caught in the blades of the machine by the third wash, and then died another death two weeks later when he had accidentally jammed a sleepy foot into one of the already gaping holes. 

It’s been a while since anyone’s seen them, but Donghyuck thought to pull them out of the closet today for a new purpose. A second, more violent breath of life. 

“It—it’s nothing,” Mark croaks out, shaking his head as if it would do anything to sew patches across the skin of Donghyuck’s thighs. He brisk walks away to where Johnny and Ten are creating cinematic fodder for the fans, but not fast enough that Donghyuck wouldn’t see the look on his face.

He looks mad, like Donghyuck had somehow stolen Christmas from right under his nose. But whoever said that God was born in December? 

No, c’mere. Wanna know a secret? God was born in August. And today, Donghyuck’s invited him to come down and watch him cry.

**1 Corinthians 11:24**

Donghyuck’s seen the kinds of things Mark writes about him in his diary when he thinks he’s not looking. 

Half of them are pretty, grammatically correct Korean sentences strung together in reflection and in thanks, for the days they spend stewing in each other’s company, holed up in Mark’s room watching romcoms, eating chips and making out until they make themselves sick. 

But the other half—the nasty half, the I wanna choke him with my bare hands half—is in English, because even on his worst days, Mark never wants Donghyuck to see the kind of ungodly things his brain is capable of conjuring. 

_All of that sneaking around, and for what?_ Donghyuck thinks—out of breath, out of his mind. 

Over the years, Donghyuck’s gotten much better at reading Mark’s seventh grade scrawl so long as it’s not in cursive, but this—Mark holding him down and reaching a hand between his honeyed legs, this—Donghyuck thrashing against the sheets, trying not to be so _damn_ loud, this is a type of confession that requires no translation. 

“C’mon, don’t be like that,” Mark murmurs, kissing at the sensitive spot behind his ears. He nips lightly at the lobe, and Donghyuck finally frees his bottom lip, body trembling like a flower storm-swept in Mark’s arms. “You asked for this, didn’t you?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Donghyuck makes a tortured sound, throat thick with tears. “Mark, _please_ —” 

Mark cuts him off, sliding two fingers back into his hole, wet and warm and obscenely shiny from the sheer amount of lube that’s been fucked into him over the last forty minutes. It’s hardly his best record, but it’s been so long since Mark’s feasted on him that every single minute feels like a stretch to eternity.

“That’s not an answer, baby,” he says, curling his fingers up where it matters. 

Donghyuck stills for one terribly long moment, before his back is arching clean off the bed, lips parting in a high keening sound. He’d be embarrassed if he still knew up from down, but right now all Donghyuck knows is Mark whispering filth into his ear— _How much longer can you take, huh? Think you can go for an hour?_ —tap, tap, tapping inside him in a precarious insistence, strumming the very fine line between edging and _edged_.

“Yes,” Donghyuck gasps, all the muscles in his enduring little body tense and high strung. The drag of Mark’s fingers inside him plays like his favorite record left on repeat, and he’s not even sure what he’s agreeing to anymore, except that it’s—“Mark!” All of him, festering in every crevice of Donghyuck’s body, mind, and soul. “Mark. God, fuck, _fuck_.” 

He panics, pupils shaking in the low light thinking he’s blown it, it’s over, and Mark’s gonna leave him just like this. But Mark only shushes him, stilling all ministrations as he murmurs praises— _So good, so perfect for me Donghyuck-ah_ —all over his skin. 

“You looked so pretty today, baby.” Mark kisses down the line of his throat, licking his way down to swirl at an aching nipple. “Dressed up just for me?”

Donghyuck’s body answers for him in what must be a pitiful combination of sights. His cock jumps at the mere shadow of Mark’s hand, his hole clenching and unclenching around the length of Mark’s peace. Tears of desperation seep out of him from every pore, all the while Mark still continues to remain fully clothed and in control since the moment Donghyuck’s back hit the bed. 

“Just for you,” Donghyuck chokes, fists bunched up against the sheets, the side of his tear stained face pressed into the pillow to keep grounded. “Only for you.” 

A resounding yes in every dictionary. 

Amid the tears, Donghyuck sees Mark smile this soft godless thing that reminds him of the man beyond the malice, the Mark before magic, the Minhyung behind the madness. The sight of him is so beautiful that Donghyuck’s love expands twelve times the size of his little bird cage of a heart, bursting out of its seams when Mark pulls himself up to catch the breathy sigh between Donghyuck’s lips. 

All of this—the malice, the magic, the madness, and everything in between—his, his, _his_. 

“I want—” Donghyuck soars, and then stutters into Mark’s mouth when he feels fingers being pulled out of him. “I want you to have me.”

“I will,” Mark gently coaxes, leaving one last chaste kiss on Donghyuck’s lips before pulling away. Donghyuck moans when Mark gently cups his balls, feeling its fullness in the palm of his hand. “I’ll have you, baby, in any which way you want. But you have to be patient, okay? Can you do that for me?” 

Donghyuck whimpers, leaving it up to Mark to decipher what it means for him to spread his legs wider. 

“Always so good to me,” Mark says, mouthing along the side of Donghyuck’s cock as if to say grace before going in and swallowing him whole. The heat of Mark’s mouth makes Donghyuck’s head spin. It’s too much, too fast, but as if that wasn’t enough, Mark slips three fingers back inside him, making Donghyuck moan so loudly it’s almost a scream. 

And then it just keeps coming. 

The thing is, green lights make Mark’s eyes go red, and then he’s going to be merciless until every little bit of his passion projects are examined and picked apart. 

Tonight it’s him, and Donghyuck cries, and cries, and hopes no one is around to hear him because this—all of this, the melodies Mark composes and recomposes by the hollow of his mouth, the slip of his fingers—this is a sample that only Mark is allowed to mix. 

“Please, please, _please_ —” Donghyuck begs, eyes rolling to the back of his head in search for a period, a fucking exclamation point—anything to serve as a breather from Mark’s relentless pace. 

Mark shushes him and gives him something close. A comma, for all his troubles, deft fingers curling into Donghyuck’s tight heat, making him cry out. Turns out not all punctuation marks are built the same, and there’s a reason why Donghyuck can’t seem to finish his sentences. 

“I—” Donghyuck is almost there, wrung out and bruised maybe, but right fucking there. “Let me, please, baby—Mark, I—I gotta—"

“You wanna come, Hyuckie?” 

“ _Yesyesyes_ ,” Donghyuck sobs, fucked out and overwhelmed out of his mind. Mark’s pushing even further, speeding up his wrists, swiping the pad of his thumb right under the head of Donghyuck’s cock. “Need it, please— _fuck_! Mark, please—I’ll do _anything_!” 

“Anything?” Mark asks, voice low. 

“Oh—Oh God—” Donghyuck’s body weeps for him,“God! Fuck, fuck, _Mark_!”

“Then come for me, baby.” 

And here lies Lee Donghyuck; a melody that shakes and trembles like a man who witnessed murder by his own hands. Because isn’t that what it is, in the end? Donghyuck dies in Mark’s arms every night, and no matter how many times the morning digs him back up, the brand of Mark’s touch never fades. It only extends an invitation for another death, and Donghyuck—addicted and so in love, RSVPs again and again. 

_Take eat; this is my body which is broken for you._

**Author's Note:**

> i'm going to be honest, this piece terrifies the hell out of me. each and every one of these words were pulled out of me with great pain and i'm not sure if i can pull off something like this again in the future. with that said, i'm relieved to finally have this out in the world, and if there's anyone to thank, it's sizhanu for threatening to delete tbomw if i didn't finish this by day 7 of mh week lmao. 
> 
> i truly want to hear what you guys thought about this, so if it's not too much, let me know wherever it's convenient!  
> as always, kudos and comments are appreciated, and i hope you all have a wonderful 2021! 
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/whitenoisce) or [cc](https://curiouscat.qa/whitenoisce)


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